CNN commentator nails it as Chicago council smashes thumbs

While the Chicago City Council passed a strict gun sales law today, a CNN commentator warned about blaming the gun lobby for mass shootings.

Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images

In a remarkable commentary published this afternoon, CNN commentator and legal analyst Mel Robbins noted that the next time there is a mass shooting, one should not blame gun rights organizations or so-called “lax gun laws,” but instead “Look first at the shooter and the mental health services he did or didn’t get.”

This was hitting the news wires about the same time that the Chicago City Council in a 48-0 vote, approved the gun sales scheme crafted by anti-gun Mayor Rahm Emanuel. That package includes video recording of all gun sales, a three-day waiting period for a handgun purchase and a 24-hour hold on rifles and shotguns. It also contains a one-handgun-per-month limit per buyer, and special-use permits for gun dealers.

Not that it matters, but Santa Barbara killer Elliot Rodger passed three background checks, endured three ten-day waiting periods to buy his handguns and also bought them at intervals that satisfied the one-gun-a-month requirement. He still killed six people, including three he stabbed fatally with a weapon that required no waiting period or background check to purchase.

But Rodger, like virtually all mass shooters in recent memory, clearly had mental health issues. As Robbins noted right up front, “California’s gun control laws received an ‘A-’ grade from both The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, the Los Angeles Times reported.” Yet these gun laws failed miserably to stop the very kind of crime they were pandered to prevent.

Robbins didn’t stop there. She took mental health laws to task, noting that a report this year from the Treatment Advocacy Center – a non-profit group that deals with mental illness and “barriers to treatment” – looked at mental commitment laws in each state. It outlined certain criteria including involuntary commitment laws.

“On virtually all counts,” Robbins wrote, “California received an ‘F’ (it got a ‘C’ on emergency evaluation). In Rodger’s case, a friend concerned about alarming videos he’d posted on YouTube had alerted a county mental health staff member, and police had conferred with his mother, but this was not enough to get him committed.”

Earlier this month, Mark Glaze, former director at Michael Bloomberg’s “Everytown for Gun Safety,” candidly acknowledged that “nothing that we have to offer would have stopped that mass shooting,” as he talked about Santa Barbara. That same sentiment could apply to every other high-profile shooting that the gun prohibition lobby has tried to exploit over the past several years, including the D.C. Navy Yard, Aurora, Tucson, both Seattle shootings, both Fort Hood shootings, and even Sandy Hook.

But as Robbins intimated in her analysis, the knee-jerk reaction from anti-gunners is to blame the National Rifle Association and the alleged easy access to firearms. Today’s anti-gun vote in Chicago confirms that nothing will change, and do not look for anything fundamentally different from Seattle Mayor Ed Murray and the city council, which was still meeting this afternoon on “gun violence” problems in the Jet City.

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Dave Workman is an author, senior editor at TheGunMag.com, communications director for the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, award-winning outdoor writer, former member of the NRA Board of Directors and recognized expert on Washington State gun laws.